After BP CEO Tony Hayward complained last week to a reporter in Louisiana, “I’d like my life back,” U.S. Rep. Charlie Melanconlaunched a petition to take Hayward’s job back.

The Louisiana Democrat called on BP to fire its chief executive over those remarks and the response to the spill that continues to spew thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day.

“Tony Hayward just wants his life back,” Melancon wrote in a message accompanying the petition. “Well, I don’t exactly think Tony Hayward deserves a vacation, but I’m not going to stand in his way. I think it’s time for BP to fire Tony Hayward.” 

More than 2,000 people have signed the petition, which is posted on Melancon’s campaign website, with hundreds of people leaving angry messages for Hayward along with their names.

“Go put on some hip boots, grab a bottle of Dawn detergent walk up to our coast and start cleaning the mess your company’s greed made!” one note reads.

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BELLE CHASSE, La. — The Plaquemines Parish emergency operations center, which looks like a suitable place to plan an invasion of Europe, sits on the third floor of a nondescript government building off the highway.

At 8 a.m. every day, a collection of officials from the parish, the state, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and BP gather for a staff meeting. On a recent morning, the group sat, waiting, surrounded by television screens, a buffet counter of walkie-talkies and placards emblazoned with serious-looking acronyms that hang from the ceiling over a long conference table.

They were waiting for Billy Nungesser. When he marched in, he had already been up for hours, as usual, appearing on the morning TV news shows. He sat down and yanked an eyedropper out of a paper bag — a bug had flown into his eye during an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN. He squeezed out some drops, then got down to business.

Mr. Nungesser, a native Louisianan, is president ofPlaquemines Parish, an elongated rural jurisdiction that runs southeast from New Orleans and escorts the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico.

Within hours of the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Mr. Nungesser, 51, became a go-to guy for the news media. In the ensuing weeks, he has turned into the angry everyman of the oil spill, whether delivering a broadside against the government and BP’s response efforts on CNN or standing in the gymnasium of Boothville-Venice Elementary School (Home of the Oilers!) before an anxious crowd of shrimpers and fishermen.

“I know it’s going to be rough,” he said to the crowd in a speech that sounded at times like a locker room pep talk. “I know everything’s not going to go our way. But they’re not going to beat us.”

“Go get ’em, Billy,” someone shouted from the bleachers.

To hear Mr. Nungesser tell it, the big boys — BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers — have all been better at pointing fingers than solving problems.

Along with Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mr. Nungesser has been a dogged advocate for a plan to build barrier islands out of dredged material to keep the oil off the shores.

There are a number of experts, including the Army Corps of Engineers, who think this is abad idea, citing cost, time and environmental impact. In Mr. Nungesser’s gospel, that kind of response, even if it turns out to be true, is only half an answer. Come up with a better idea, he tells critics, or keep your reservations to yourself.

“These guys have no clue and no ability to think outside the box,” he said at the morning staff meeting.

Despite an affinity for the spotlight, Mr. Nungesser is a hard man to pin down. Between a cellphone that buzzes like an angry wasp, an unending string of interview requests, a visit by the president and the actual work of managing the parish, it is nearly impossible to slow him down long enough to confirm some basic biographical facts.

For example: How did Mr. Nungesser come to own an elk ranch in the parish?

The elk, he said late Thursday night over a 10-minute dinner of Sun Chips and soda, were bought from a man in Nebraska with the money he got from selling his house to his sister when he went to live in a shipping container.

Mr. Nungesser throws out sentences like that, and before one has a chance to ask him to elaborate, he is back on the phone, talking to a state trooper or a parish official or his fiancée, who needs to know that a television camera crew was following him home that night.

Back to the shipping container.

“I had a Jacuzzi,” he clarified. “It was nice.”

Continue at the NYT

PALOS VERDES, Calif (Reuters) – Film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron said on Wednesday that BP Plc turned down his offer to help combat the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Over the last few weeks I’ve watched, as we all have, with growing horror and heartache, watching what’s happening in the Gulf and thinking those morons don’t know what they’re doing,” Cameron said at the All Things Digital technology conference.

Cameron, the director of “Avatar” and “Titanic,” has worked extensively with robot submarines and is considered an expert in undersea filming. He did not say explicitly who he meant when he referred to “those morons.”

His comments came a day after he participated in a meeting at theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington to “brainstorm” solutions to the oil spill.

Cameron said he has offered to help the government and BP in dealing with the spill. He said he was “graciously” turned away by the British energy giant.

He said he has not spoken with the White House about his offer, and said that the outside experts who took part in the EPA meeting were now “writing it all up and putting in reports to the various agencies.”

The film director has helped develop deep-sea submersible equipment and other underwater ocean technology for the making of documentaries exploring the wrecks of the ocean liner Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck some two miles below the surface.

‘REALLY SMART PEOPLE’

Cameron suggested the U.S. government needed to take a more active role in monitoring the undersea gusher, which has become the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

“I know really, really, really smart people that work typically at depths much greater than what that well is at,” Cameron said.

The BP oil spill off the U.S. Gulf Coast is located a mile below the surface.

While acknowledging that his contacts in the deep-sea industry do not drill for oil, Cameron said that they are accustomed to operating various underwater vehicles and electronic optical fiber systems.

“Most importantly,” he added, “they know the engineering that it requires to get something done at that depth.”

Among the key issues that Cameron said he is interested in helping the government with are methods of monitoring the oil leak and investigating it.

“The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation,” he said.

“Because if you’re not monitoring it independently, you’re asking the perpetrator to give you the video of thecrime scene,” Cameron added.

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(CNN) — In the weeks since an oil rig exploded and later sank into the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama has dealt with the tragedy with his signature cool, calm and collected approach.

But with the oil still gushing in what is now the worst spill in U.S. history and the environmental devastation coming ashore, the president is becoming a target of the anger that was originally directed only at BP.

“One time, go off!” director Spike Lee urged on CNN’s “AC 360°.” “If there’s any one time to go off, this is it, because this is a disaster.”

Lee’s sentiment echoes the frustration of people who want to see Obama get loud, take charge and inspire them like he did during his presidential run.

Recalling then-candidate Obama’s ability to rouse crowds into chants of “Yes, we can,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said, “There was a feeling he was going to be one of these presidents that moved us with words the way John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did in recent decades.”

Instead, Obama has presented himself as the unflappable president, with the engineer-like approach of Jimmy Carter and the legislative astuteness of Lyndon Johnson, Brinkley said.

“But in a time of great crisis, people aren’t looking for Johnson or Carter. They are looking for powerful rhetorical leadership — words that move the country in a positive direction,” he said.

Gloria Borger: We got the president we elected

The president has visited the region twice since the oil spill, most recently the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. Obama brought the tragedy to a more personal level, telling the public that he grew up in a place where the ocean is sacred, so he understands the emotional connection — but it was only a brief aside in an otherwise straightforward address.

It was hardly the outpouring that came from Louisiana Democrat Charlie Melancon, who broke into tears last week at a Capitol Hill hearing about the oil spill.

“Our culture is threatened. Our coastal economy is threatened. And everything that I know and love is at risk,” Melancon, who represents many of the affected Louisiana shoreline areas, told his Capitol Hill colleagues. Unable to finish reading his prepared statement, Melancon submitted it for the congressional record and then walked out of the hearing room as other lawmakers sought to comfort him.

And it was hardly the advocacy that’s come from Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, also of Louisiana. In a column on CNN.com, Ruben Navarrette wrote that due to Obama’s lackluster response, “Bobby has Barack on the ropes and he is coming across as more passionate and more presidential.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was pushed Tuesday to back up his claim that Obama is enraged by the situation.

“I’ve seen rage from him. I have,” Gibbs said at the daily briefing.

Asked to describe it, Gibbs pointed to the president’s “clenched jaw” and his call to “plug the damn hole.”

The president has been actively engaged in the crisis — firing the head of the Minerals Management Service, extending the moratorium on further offshore drilling and increasing the federal presence in the region.

But instead of a galvanizing cry of outrage at the failed efforts to cap the undersea gusher, Obama’s made the “let’s not panic” appeal, Brinkley said.

“With each BP failure, I think the American people have wanted to feel that the president is not just in the saddle but is leading the charge, and he’s fallen short in this regard,” he said.

Continue at CNN